PES Women
Annual Conference
Warsaw, 3-4 December 2010
MY BODY, MY RIGHTS
Anna Karamanou
PES Women Vice-President
There are three themes concerning this issue: how ideas (not based on facts) about women’s bodies are socially constructed, how these social constructions are used to control women’s lives and how women can resist these forces.
The social construction of women’s bodies is the process through which ideas (including scientific ideas) about women’s bodies develop and become socially accepted. As this literature demonstrates, this is a political process, which reflects, reinforces, or challenges the distributionof power between men and women (weitz, 2003)[1].
Beginning with the earliest written legal codes and continuing nearly to the present day, the law typically has defined women’s bodies as men’s property. In ancient societies, women who were not slaves typically belonged to their fathers before marriage and to their husbands thereafter. There are still societies which still treat women like objects.
Women’s legal status as property reflected the belief that women’s bodies were inherently different from men’s in ways that made women both defective and dangerous. This belief comes through the Aristotle’s biological theories and also Galinos, a highly influential Greek doctor who declared that women’s reproductive organs were virtually identical to men’s, but were located internally because female embryos lacked the heat needed for those organs to develop fully and externally. This view remained common among doctors until well the 18th century. Lack of heat produced many other deficiencies in women, including a smaller stature, a frailer constitution, a less developed brain and emotional and moral weakness that could endanger any men who fell under women’s spell.
These ideas later would resonate with ideas about women embedded in Christian interpretations of Mary and Eve. Theologians argue that Eve caused the fall from divine grace and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden by giving in when the snake tempted her with the forbidden fruit. According to the theologians this “original sin” occurred because women’s nature made them inherently susceptible to passions of the flesh, blinding them to reason and morality and making them a constant danger to men’s souls. Mary avoided the pitfalls of passion only by remaining virginal. Such ideas later would play a large role in fueling the witchcraft hysteria in medieval Europe and colonial America. Women formed the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people executed as witches because both Catholics and Protestants assumed that women were less intelligent than men, more driven by sexual passions and hence more susceptible to the devil’s blandishments (Barstow, 1994)[2].
The foundational thinker to Latin Christianity, St Augustine, although he acknowledged that women posses the image of God and are redeemable, he believed that they were created by God from the beginning to be under male subjugation and they can never represent God. St. Augustine’s view of women was worsened by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century by the appropriation of Aristotle’s view of gender. For Aristotle and Aquinas women were intrinsically inferior, being produced biologically as incomplete human beings. This means that women can never represent normative humanity.
Ideas about women’s frailty are also found in Charles Darwin “On the Origins of Species” in 1872. Darwin argued that females must expend so much energy on reproduction that they retain little energy for either physical or mental development. Darwin’s theories matched well with Victorian ideas about women’s sexuality, which depicted women as the objects of male desire and reinforced double sexual standards. (ibid).
These views of women and sexuality have been challenged by modern feminism. In the late 19th and20th centuries women began to struggleto win civil and political rights, higher education and professional employment. The church was hostile to women’s rights and opposed women’s suffrage. In 1930 Pope Pious XI condemned women’s emancipation as undermining the divinely founded obedience of the wife to her husband and a false deflection from her true and sole role as mother and homemaker[3]. In the late 1960s the renewed feminist movement added a demand for reproductive rights, sex education, birth control and legal abortion, to its quest for equal education, employment and political participation. Some Catholic women also began to argue for women’s ordination. In the 1960s most Protestants in Europe and USA began to ordain women.[4]
Many Bishops, sensing that the birth control issue was lost, began to focus again on the prohibition of abortion. It is well known the global crusade under the Papacy of John Paul II (1978-2004), against abortion, birth control and redefinitions of the family. This crusade was especially active in relation to UN Conferences on population, in Egypt, 1994 and on Women in Beijing 1995. The Program of Action is notable in the family planning field, emphasizing a holistic approach based on economic development and improvements in health and education, the elimination of violence against women and the enabling of women to control their fertility.
The World Health Organisation defines reproductive rights as follows: “ Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.” We must insist in this definition.
1
[1]Weitz Rose, 2003, The Politics of Women’s Bodies,ArizonaStateUniversity,Oxford University Press
[2]Barstow, Anne Llewellyn, 1994, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, San Francisco, Pandora
[3]Pius XI, Casti Connubii -1930
[4]Ruether Radford Rosemary, 2008, “Women Reproductive Rights and the Catholic Church”, Feminist Theology 2008 16:284